Geographic

Burglar Caught on WebCam Jailed
A 19-year-burglar is now enjoying an eleven month stretch at Her Majesty’s Pleasure after he was photographed burgling a house by the owner’s Webcam.
Software engineer Duncan Grisby, 30, set up the movement-activated surveillance system following a previous burglary three years before.
The Webcam was set to start filming once it registered motion, with images of the hapless burglar being safely transferred from the computer to a remote server.
The Webcam captured every movement of Benjamin Park, 19, including a handy close-up when he stared straight in the Webcam before going on to steal the computer and other equipment worth £3,719 ($7,000, Euro 5,300).
When 30-year-old Mr Grisby returned from holiday this month, the pictures were handed over to police, who instantly recognised Park, a very naughty boy already on bail for an attempted burglary in Ely.
Police tracked down Park, who was already boasting 33 previous convictions for theft, to a block of flats in Cambridge, where he was arrested as he tried to leg it from the long arm of the law.
Travers Chalk, the chairman of the Cambridge bench, sentenced Park to 11 months in prison after he admitted the offences. “You have a record which is awful, dreadful,” the magistrate told him.
Understandably, Mr Grisby wasn’t too chuffed with what he felt was a lenient sentence for a serial burglar, saying, “It is a rather pathetic sentence to hand someone like that, a career burglar.”
Although photographs of the burglar in action have been published by the police, one piece of footage that hasn’t been available was the look on Park’s face when Det Sgt Al Page, who leads the Cambridge burglary squad, showed him the Webcam shots.
Burglar snared by computer Webcam (more pics)
18 February, 2005
Envisional Report:: UK Biggest Downloaders of Copied TV Shows
We may not win many things these days, but when it comes to downloading pirated television, us Brits can puff out our chests and proudly declare, “we’re number one!”
The UK has emerged as the world’s biggest market for downloading pirated television, driven by tech-savvy fans unwilling to wait for popular U.S. shows such as ’24’ and ‘Desperate Housewives.’
Britain’s status as the big cheeses, head honchos and numero unos of TV downloading was revealed on Thursday in a study by UK technology consultancy Envisional.
The report could pose problems for UK broadcaster BSkyB, which is counting on high-profile US shows such as the new “24” series to draw new subscribers and entice advertisers to its satellite TV service.
According to Envisional’s report, devilish Brit downloaders account for nearly one fifth of TV downloads through file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent and eDonkey. In second and third place were Australia and the United States.
“Because there’s such a demand for US TV, the UK is going to be the main downloader,” said Envisional research consultant David Price.
The downloading frenzy has been driven by the consumer-annoying practice of releasing popular US TV shows such as “The West Wing,” “The Sopranos” and “Friends” months after they’ve been seen by our American cousins.
Broadband-connected UK fans keen to get the latest fix of these shows have – not surprisingly – elected to download the programs instead, with episodes of popular shows like ’24’ showing up on the popular file-trading network BitTorrent minutes after airing in the United States.
According to Envisional, a typical ’24’ episode is downloaded by about 100,000 users, with “The Simpsons,” “The OC” and a host of sci-fi programs including “Stargate SG-1” and “Enterprise” also being firm favourites with the UK pirates.
Other TV networks airing large amounts of US shows are monitoring the growing popularity of online TV downloads, although insiders feel that the level of technical knowledge required will keep it a minority interest.
For now.
Of course, in the US, Hollywood is already putting in the boot, with the Motion Picture Association of America dishing out lawsuits like they were going out of fashion.
Several sites providing links to movie and TV download sites have already been closed down, with LokiTorrent being a major scalp last week.
The broadcast industry’s failure to learn from online music sharing means that without a legitimate TV download service, consumers will continue to use file swapping sites while lawyers get fatter.
Envisional
Motion Picture Association of America
BSkyB
18 February, 2005
Sony PSP UMD Movie Pricing Announced
Kids today, eh? Spoilt rotten they are.
When I were a lad, an ‘entertainment system’ would take the form of a wobbly cassette player or perhaps a racy CD/radio combination for the well-heeled, but these young ‘uns today are positively spoilt for choice.
Not only can they loll around in their messy bedrooms all day and play state-of-the-art video games and music CDs on their PlayStation Portables, but now the little blighters can watch the latest movie releases too, courtesy of Sony’s proprietary Universal Media Disc (UMD) format.
Within weeks, weary parents around the country will soon be nagged into submission by persistent teenagers demanding the $28.95 (£15.30, Euro 21) to buy the cult classic, ‘The House of Flying Daggers’, scheduled for release on 19th April, 2005.
New films published on UMD will share a simultaneous release date as US/Region 1 DVD releases, with a price of $28.95 (£15.30, Euro 21) or thereabouts with a lower price of $19.95 (£10.50, Euro 15) for films that have already been released.
Accordingly, the other four previously announced UMD titles – Hellboy, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, XXX and Once Upon A Time In Mexico – will all retail for $19.95 when they go on sale on 19th April.
Following the initial flurry of releases in April, Sony plans to annoy parents further with the release of new titles at monthly intervals thereafter.
As a special bonus, the first million PlayStation Portables sold in the US following its 24th March release will also come with a UMD movie copy of Spider-Man 2.
Although the pricing appears attractive to the target audience, it’s the same price as regular DVD and some may feel that they’d be better off buying something with greater compatibility.
PlayStation Portables
18 February, 2005
Italian DJ Gets Huge Fine For Copied MP3s
A “well known” Italian DJ could be hit with a record-breaking fine of up to 1.4 million euros ($1.8 million, £968,000) for using thousands of pirate music files in a nightclub near Rome, police said on Wednesday.
Police in the town of Rieti, near Rome, said they raided a popular nightclub earlier this week as part of a king-size crackdown on piracy and seized 500 illegally copied music videos and more than 2,000 MP3 music files.
The get-tough operation, targeting radio stations and clubs around the region, was led by the Fiscal Police (Guardia Di Financa, that deal with financial crime), who also seized a large quantity of “audiovisual material” and software.
There are a lot of inaccurate reports floating around about this and we wanted to get the full story, so called up the FIMI in Italy. They told us that the copyright law in Italy dates back to 1941 but was most recently updated a year ago. Under the law the DJ was fined 100 Euro ($130, £69) per copied track, this figure was then doubled to 500,000 Euro. Only if the fine is not paid within 60 days, will it increase to 1.4m.
The reason for the doubling was unclear. Under Italian law, the precise details of the case are not made public until the case comes to court.
The DJ is free to appeal against the fine. Once the fine has been finalised, the money can be paid off monthly.
“For the MP3 files, which were kept on the DJ’s personal computer, the DJ has received a fine of 1.4 million euros,” Rieti finance police said in a statement (the fine is subject to administrative recourse). The DJ may also be subject to further criminal sanctions.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said the fine was the biggest ever slapped on an individual for unlawful music copying and the use of copyrighted music in the MP3 format.
“We are pleased with the fine imposed by the Rieti Fiscal police,” said Director of the Italian Recording Industry Association (FIMI) Enzo Mazza.
He continued, “This deejay was touring clubs and making money out of the music he played – while those who had invested time, talent, hard work and money into creating the music in the first place did not get a cent. We hope this precedent will serve as a deterrent for those who are thinking of doing the same.”
Seeing as venues already pay money to the collection societies for public dance licenses we find the size of this fine a little baffling.
It could certainly be argued that DJs can act as ambassadors for new music (and therefore the music companies) with some high-profile DJs having a considerable influence on the record buying public.
After all, why else would record companies ply DJs with endless vinyl/promos and other inducements in the hope of getting their tunes played?
Perhaps now that times are more lean for the record companies, they’re cutting back on the freebies.
It appears the line between theft and promotion can sometimes be a blurred one, and we’re not convinced that punishing DJs with such enormous fines is the way the record industry should be protecting their sales…
17 February, 2005
T-Mobile Use WiMax and WiFi on UK Trains and Double WiFi Coverage
T-Mobile has unveiled ambitious plans to further expand its global Wi-Fi footprint, aiming to install 20,000 hotspots across the world by the end of the year, including trains.
Clearly mindful of the huge growth in VoIP traffic and the corresponding loss of revenue, the network is hoping to ‘own’ a large slice of the WiFi action and keep raking in the profits, no matter how many consumers disconnect from its telephone and cellular networks.
Already a big cheese in the world of Wi-Fi, T-Mobile currently has over 5,300 hotspots in the US and over 7,000 hotpots across Europe.
As part of their uber-expansion meisterplan, T-Mobile (Deutche Telecom’s mobile brand if you didn’t know) is offering WiFi hotspots on trains and what they claim is the first “truly broadband Wi-Fi service” on trains in the UK. We learnt this with some surprise, as GNER have been running a Satellite-powered WiFi service on their trains since April 2004.
Currently trialing on the busy London to Brighton route run by Southern Trains in the UK, the T-Mobile commercial service will launch in Spring. The selection of the route makes perfect sense, with this train line being the physical embodiment of the Information Super Highway, taking Nuu Media types between the two UK centres of online culture.
Naturally, there’s some cunning technological shenanigans involved in keeping Internet connections open while trains plunge into long tunnels, and T Mobile has solved this problem by running a WiMax network running alongside the tracks.
WiMax is a fixed-wireless technology based on the 802.16 standard, and in this instance allows for high speed connectivity of up to 32 Mbps bi-directionally to and from the train. WiMax can run up to 70Mbps. Wi-Fi antennae are then used to distribute the signal within the carriages.
The service will allow commuters an additional 55 minutes of online time in each direction, letting them liven up their journey with remote office work, Web surfing and the ability to email their loved ones to say that they’re stuck in a tunnel somewhere near Gatwick.
If you’re fed up with five pounds an hour WiFi access, you’ll be pleased that T-Mobile is also bringing down its once-eye-wateringly expensive Wi-Fi tariffs to something comparable to US rates. A new “all you can eat” WiFi tariff in the UK offers unlimited wireless access for £20 + VAT per month. This includes train-based access.
Germany appear to get a rougher deal with a time-based, ‘all-bearer’ tariff in Germany priced at 35 Euros for 10 hours. With this customers can download or upload as much data as they like on these schemes via 2.5G, 3G or Wi-Fi over the 10 hours.
T-mobile
17 February, 2005
RAJAR announces results of Audiometer Validation Test
Arbitron Portable People Meter and Eurisko Media Monitor selected for further field testing RAJAR(Radio Joint Audience Research) has announced the results of its pioneering Audiometer Validation Test which took place in November 2004.
Of the three audiometers which took part in the test, two have been selected for further fieldwork tests: the Arbitron Portable People Meter (PPM) and the Eurisko Media Monitor.
The Audiometer Validation Test, designed in conjunction with the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), was set up to determine how well the audiometers could identify up to 33 different radio services (both music and speech-based) under as wide a variety of real life situations as possible.
The three audiometers, the Arbitron PPM, the Eurisko Media Monitor and the GfK/Telecontrol MediaWatch, were all subjected to the same listening conditions over the course of a weekend in November 2004.
To make the test as thorough as possible, hundreds of unique listening environments were generated, with RAJAR specifying several criteria which the audiometers should fulfil – these included the ability to identify all formats equally, whether music or speech, against a variety of extraneous background noises, when played at differing volume levels and regardless of whether the wearers were stationary or in motion.
RAJAR wasn’t anticipating 100% accuracy from any or all of the audiometers on test, but they hoped to be able to identify listening correctly across FM, AM and DAB in a variety of day-to-day conditions.
Sally de la Bedoyere, managing director, RAJAR, commented on their results:
“RAJAR has selected the Arbitron PPM and the Eurisko Media Monitor meters following analysis of the Test results, which showed that, despite using different techniques, both audiometers identified very similar numbers of listening sessions. Their level of correct identification was in line with that anticipated when designing the test.”
She added that their decision was based “solely on the needs of the UK market, where monitoring AM, FM and digital broadcasting is highly complex.” and described the tests as “Another momentous hurdle has been crossed in our journey to achieving the objectives of the Roadmap by 2007.”
As radio continues to fragment, the ability to measure small audiences becomes ever more vital to the survival of stations, with advertisers needing solid proof that they’re not investing their precious advertising budget into tumbleweed stations.
This has added significant pressure on RAJAR to produce reliable measuring systems, with the threat of lawsuits always hanging in the air (see: RAJAR defeat TWG Audience Court Case
Digital-Lifestyles was present during the testing last year and we can vouch that it was very comprehensive – and quite possibly the largest world-wide trial to date.
14 February, 2005
MPAA Wins Court Case Against BitTorrent Site, LokiTorrent
Despite surviving last year’s pre-Christmas BitTorrent blitz, the LokiTorrent site was finally closed down by a Dallas court yesterday.
The Website’s operator, Edward Webber, put up a valiant fight, with its front page featuring a counter, detailing the amount of donations it had received towards its budget of $30,000 per month in legal fees.
The site’s homepage has now been replaced by a slightly distasteful back-slapping MPAA (The Motion Picture Association of America) notice boasting the caption, “You can click, but you can’t hide”.
It’s not unusual for file sharing sites to be closed down, but what’s really alarming file swappers, is that LokiTorrent has agreed to turn over the server’s user logs – and with over 750,000 registered users distributing more than 35,000 movies, songs and other items, this could leave thousands of users open to prosecution.
BitTorrent has become hugely popular in recent years because it can deliver large files faster than other file-sharing technologies. BitTorrent software has no built-in method for finding files, and users rely on tracker Websites such as LokiTorrent that act as directories.
These tracker sites compile links to digital goodies that are being shared online as “torrents,” the format used by the BitTorrent software. The links connect users to the Internet addresses of the people supplying copies of the file.
Although it’s notoriously difficult to trace users of swapping sites, the advent of broadband makes it considerably easier to track down heavy users, with a specific IP number often being associated with a particular connection for many months.
This latest prosecution is only part of MPAA’s aggressive anti-piracy strategy, with the company dishing out lawsuits like confetti. A second wave of lawsuits against BitTorrent tracker sites in the US has been announced, along with more lawsuits against individual file sharers.
They’ve also filed more notices asking Internet providers to shut down eDonkey servers on their networks and lawsuits against four Websites that sold file-sharing programs.
No matter how many lawyers get fat pursing piracy cases, it’s clear that they’re unlikely to put an end to the practice, with super-clever techie kids creating new technologies as soon as one becomes unworkable.
11 February, 2005
Dead Granny sued by RIAA – A Serious Own Goal
If they weren’t already unpopular enough with a large part of the online music file sharers, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has managed to score a spectacular PR own goal by suing a dead woman for swapping music files.
The Associated Press reported that investigators at the RIAA identified Gertrude Walton as a prolific sharer known as “smittenedkitten” and set about bringing this evil distributor of music to justice.
A federal lawsuit was duly filed, with the RIAA claiming that Mrs Walton had shared more than 700 songs through P2P networks.
But there was a slight problem: the defendant was a computer-illiterate 83-year-old grandmother who has never owned a computer.
And there was an even bigger problem: she had died the month before the lawsuit was filed.
After being notified of the upcoming legal action, the dead woman’s daughter, Robin Chianumba, faxed a copy of her mother’s death certificate to RIAA adding, “I am pretty sure she is not going to leave Greenwood Memorial Park (where she is buried) to attend the hearing”.
This king size cock-up does nothing to RIAA’s bully boy reputation. In 2003 the association successfully sued a twelve year-old girl for copyright infringement after her hard drive was found to be harbouring an MP3 file of her favourite TV show. Her working class parents were forced to shell out two thousand dollars in a settlement.
RIAA
Boycott RIAA
8 February, 2005
4 Gigapixel Camera – Voyeurs Beware.
Physicist Graham Flint is working on an ultra-high-resolution portrait of America, creating a series of truly enormous gigapixel images taken with a camera made up of decommissioned Cold War hardware and Wired has discovered him (link below).
(more…)
7 February, 2005
Commodore is back! With ancient games! In a tiny box!
The most successful gaming computer of the 80s is back – this time in a teensy weensy new ‘Direct to TV’ (D2TV™) unit.
In a move sure to get thirty-something gamers blubbering with nostalgic tears of their lost youth, the new C64 D2TV™ box recreates thirty of the most well known games from the Commodore 64 home computer range, including games from legendary developers Epyx, the Bitmap Brothers and Hewson.
The chunky two-tone beige Commodore box of the 80s has been replaced by a small joystick-toting, handheld unit, which happily spares users the ‘go out for a bite’ long loading times of the original computer.
The C64 DTV™ was created by DC Studios in conjunction with Ironstone Partners and Mammoth Toys and has already proved a big hit in the US, with over 250,000 units being sold since Thanksgiving 2004. Such was the enthusiasm for the product that 40,000 boxes were shifted on the launch day alone.
Now Europe is to finally get its own custom version, specifically designed for European territories.
The DTV contains the classic games: Alleykat, California Games, Championship Wrestling, Cyberdyne Warrior, Cybernoid, Cybernoid II, Eliminator, Exolon, Firelord, Gateway to Apshai, Head the Ball, Impossible Mission, Impossible Mission 2, Jumpman Junior, Marauder, Maze Mania, Mission Impossibubble, Nebulus, Netherworld, Paradroid, Pitstop, Pitstop 2, Ranarama, Speedball, Summer Games, Super Cycle, Sword of Fargoal, Uridium, Winter Games and Zynaps.
Unfortunately, two of the finest Commodore games ever created are notable by their absence: the horribly compulsive Elite and Sensible Soccer, arguably the best football game ever invented.
Even with these omissions, a new generation looks set to enjoy the chunky graphics, pixellated screens and compelling gameplay that rightly made Commodore one of the true innovators of computer gaming.
4 February, 2005